Voting in the Green Party leadership election opened on Friday, with the result to be declared on 2 September. The contest between Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay, running on a joint ticket, and Zack Polanski has focused to an unusual extent on electoral tactics and the hopes of winning a large number of Commons seats from Labour.
Meanwhile, the Corbyn-Sultana party is still taxiing towards the runway for take-off, its passengers talking excitedly about replacing Labour as the main party of the left, either on its own or in alliance with the Greens.
There are plenty of reasons for being sceptical of both parties’ ambitions, which I will come to in a moment. But there is also a real possibility that Labour support will collapse. I wrote last week about Keir Starmer’s “Macron strategy”, by which he presents himself as the alternative to Nigel Farage as prime minister. Thus he would seek to rally disaffected Labour voters who might be tempted to stay at home or defect to other parties, plus Greens, Corbynites, Liberal Democrats and soft Conservatives, by presenting them with a binary choice.
But what if that isn’t the choice by the time of the next election? What if, just as Reform has overtaken the Tories in the opinion polls, a Green-Corbynite combination overtakes Labour?
Peter Kellner, the polling guru, has commissioned research from YouGov into party loyalty. He says the figures “should terrify both Labour and the Conservatives”. He found that people who intend to vote Reform and Green are much more likely to give a positive reason for their support, such as “it has the best policy on the issue I feel most strongly about”, whereas Labour and Tory voters are more likely to give a negative reason, such as “it isn’t great but it’s better than the alternatives”.
He concludes: “The two pillars of the old Labour-Conservative duopoly, family influence and social class, have crumbled, and nothing has replaced them. Stalled living standards add to their plight.”
Every day provides more evidence of the gap between the old duopoly and the new parties in enthusiasm and commitment. The trickle of former Tory MPs defecting to Reform could become a flood if Farage, who caught the Ming vase that Starmer dropped, can carry it over the slippery floor for another couple of years.
Defections to the Corbyn-Sultana party are not on quite the same scale yet. Six former Labour councillors in Hastings, and one Labour councillor in Coventry, said on Friday that they will join the new party. But more will follow if the party can gain credibility.
As I said, there are reasons to doubt that this will happen. The party’s launch has been chaotic. The temporary name, Your Party, does not work at all. Any discussion of the party begins in confusion. “Your Party...” “It’s not my party...”
The 600,000 sign-ups expressing interest make up a relatively small number compared with, say, the 6 million who signed the 2019 petition to revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU.
There are doubts about the wisdom of re-running Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign outside the Labour Party. James Matthewson, who was a Labour spokesperson under Corbyn, wrote for The i Paper on Friday: “My warning to the left, especially those young lefties who are still unjaded and have the energy we need to change the world, is: don’t be lured into another vanity project.” He thought the idea of Zarah Sultana as a fresh face that would mean a fresh approach was “far from the truth”.
As for the Greens, there is an air of unreality that hangs over the leadership election debate, which has become bitter and personal, at least between Ramsay and Polanski. (Ramsay refused to say he “liked” Polanski in a radio debate between the two.) Ramsay and Chowns claim to be focused on electoral success, having delivered the quadrupling of seats from one to four last year, while Polanski claims to be more ambitious, describing his approach as eco-populism and being willing to do pre-election deals with the Corbyn-Sultana outfit.
It may be that climate change – “the issue I feel most strongly about” – and idealistic disillusionment with a Labour Party governing in bleak times will be enough to break through, but the red-green alliance has nothing yet to match the power of the issue of immigration combined with the charisma of Farage.
Of course, Reform’s success may not last. Farage may, in turn, drop the Ming vase. He was forced today to deny speculation about his health, telling The Times that his Tory and Labour rivals were “spreading these rumours” because “it’s the last card they’ve got”. But the untrue rumours nevertheless draw attention to the extent to which Reform’s advance depends on a single individual.
It may be, even if Farage is the leader of the real opposition by the time of the next election, that Starmer’s Macron strategy will work. Or it could be, if the Labour vote does collapse, that the Lib Dems prove to be the saviours of pragmatic moderation. Ed Davey’s inoffensive army, rather than the Green Corbynites, could fill more of the gap left by Labour’s retreat.
But I think a Labour collapse is an underestimated possibility.
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